It's called "the Ken Burns Effect." No, not earnest, reverent documentaries with actors voicing generals and baseball players. Rather, it's a tool of iMovie, Apple's video-editing software, which has made would-be Burnses of obsessives and grandparents everywhere. It came loaded on my PowerBook, but I never noticed it; I don't shoot much video. But a friend pointed out how you can do the Ken B. on stills and turn a hike, a trip, a birthday—anything, any day—into a video narrative, complete with voice and sound track. Zoom out from a tree to a landscape, slowly pan and zoom across a room ... click and drag and done!
Another friend, a professional video editor who uses much more sophisticated Apple software, is both bemused and a little worried: "I think we can all agree that it's wonderful that Apple is making it so incredibly easy for the average person to now do a lot of things that only trained professionals could do a few years before. And I think we can all agree that it's horrible that Apple is making it so incredibly easy for the average person to now do a lot of things that only trained professionals could do a few years ago."
Like, power to the people, man. Is this not the age of the free agent, the blogger, the Internet-lodged, one-person newsroom/production studio, no longer bound by the "elitist" mainstream media? Is this not the promise of the electronic age—to everyone the means to be heard, to be important? Whether it's My Trip to Thailand or Grandma Silvie's Visit or Michael Moore Really Sucks!, you have the tools, too! You are Ken Burns.
You are The Media. The apotheosis of the everyday and the empowerment of everyone go hand in hand, and both have been, one way or another, goals of both the left and the right. Nonetheless, personal freedoms are shaped differently on either side of the political divide, and each camp identifies a different "elite" as its oppressor. It testifies to the right's skillful manipulation of terms that it has yoked a connotation of the word to "Hollywood," "academic" and, perhaps most disturbingly, "the mainstream media."
The advent of a text-messaging shorthand for that last group, MSM, only tends to support the suspicion that all journalists constitute a tyrannical cabal of leftists, still trying to mislead us. But thanks to that doughty band of bloggers, the advance guard of freedom's purging battalions, the MSM is a fading light.
But it's worth noting that perceived freedoms can turn on you. A society that continually confirms you the center of the universe may have reasons for doing so. The more absorbed you are in panning and zooming across your experience, the more likely you are to buy the line that mean "elites" want to take it away from you. The more you crow your opinions, the less likely you are to notice facts. It's a postmodern academic conceit, and thus "elitist" to say, but to some extent all of the material available for building our personal media lives is stock images and archetypes drawn from the media. We assume ourselves free, but we're just playing with Ken Burns' toys.
Last week was "Sunshine Week," proclaimed by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Knight Foundation to "inform the public about the importance of open government, the First Amendment and the threats posed by increasing secrecy." This last concern is but the start of the MSM's worries, given it has been successfully tagged as both unreliable and retrograde, yesterday's bad news. And partly this image has been constructed for it by a government not merely news-averse, but news-subversive. It stifles inquiry by seeking to jail journalists, but it also actively confounds the news-reporting process. It has paid "columnists" to tout policies, planted a crackpot pseudo-journalist in White House news conferences and produced slick "news" segments pushing its policies.
The government has undermined the reporting of news by consulting its palette of visual cues and archetypes, layering fictions over reality and thus actively guiding the public perception of reality. The ease with which it has done this only confirms the potency of the familiar media cues that have seeped into our collective consciousness. Just as your home movie might be really Ken Burns', after all. The archetypes of media experience rule, and the government increasingly rules them.
To their credit, some digital citizens perceive this, and many lobby to be treated as journalists in order to gain equal access to officials and information, and cover from government harassment. Slate's Jacob Weisberg argues for extending shield laws: "Blogs and Internet publications have essentially solved one of the biggest worries of the past few decades, that media consolidation is diminishing independence and plurality of voices."
This might be true, and certainly more people asking questions with legal protection from government obstruction is a worthy goal. But sometimes plurality breeds cacophony, which tends to dampen the whispers of schemers while it deadens cries of warning. As pans and zooms impose a kind of grandeur on the ordinary, and everyone is elevated to oracle, the need for vigilance and discrimination deepens. The digital citizen will be diligent or duped.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.